Education

The FFF supports a number of education programmes in South East Asia. Examples of our work include:

New Generations Schools Programme

In Cambodia, we have partnered with Kampuchean Action for Primary Education (KAPE) to build, develop and scale a New Generation Schools (NGS) programme. This is the leading educational project in Cambodia and is now uniquely supported financially by the Cambodian government. The basic premis of NGS schools is to work with the government, within the existing education system, to develop academically excellent schools that are available to children from any socio-economic background.

In most schools in Cambodia, children learn by rote and teachers are often corrupt, undertrained and sometimes inept. However, by paying additional salaries to teachers, banning teacher moonlighting, improving governance structures, building libraries and IT rooms, upgrading the school environment and changing the children and indeed parent culture, New Generation Schools not only enable vast improvements in students’ education, and attitudes towards school, but also serve as a pioneering model of how collaborative work between government and NGOs can result in fundamental change.

For both KAPE and us, this is not a numbers game but a quality one. This is about getting children with real potential into good schools. The results are amazing, and KAPE’s teachers are both dedicated and innovative and its students engaged.

We are now funding the further development of the model and working to ensure that the programme can scale. We have already grown the network to six schools and, with the government's support, aim to expand to ten by 2018. These schools are located all around the country and, if successful, will prove that the NGS network is ready to expand on an even greater scale nationally, and even internationally. The impact on education in Cambodia and beyond could be huge.